STFU && RTFM » Offline Folders

Lotus Notes: Resolving "File truncated – file may have been damaged" errors

razumny — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:00:00 +0000

The error message “File truncated – file may have been damaged” is most often seen server-side, but every once in a while it will turn up on client computers, especially where Notes is installed on a network share (not a good idea) and synchronised to the local machine through offline folders.

I have to say, this is one of the clearer error messages Notes has to offer. It basically means that there is a corrupt file. The file I’ve seen it happen to the most is desktop6.ndk. What this means is that unless there’s another copy of it, you lose all the links in your dashboard.

In my opinion, the simplest way to resolve the problem is replace the faulty file, either by copying in a (non-corrupted) copy of it, or by deleting it altogether, and letting Notes replace the file automatically.

Why not to install Lotus Notes on a network share

razumny — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:00:00 +0000

As previously noted, my email client at work is Lotus Notes. For some reason, the Data folder is installed to each users’ home share on the network, and that home share is synchronised to the local drive using Offline Folders. Now, I cannot get over how bad a solution this is, for a few reasons:

Offline Folders is not designed to copy all kinds of files
Offline Folders sometimes corrupts files in copy
Loading Notes from a network share means loading everything into RAM

Now, running Notes 8, as I am, Notes take up roughly 250 MB RAM. Notes 8, compared to Notes 6, is much more RAM intensive, but makes up for it by working a lot better. Notes 6, when loaded from a network share, will take up about 280-300 MB RAM. When loaded from local drive, it takes up roughly 60 MB RAM.

In addition, running Notes from a network share is the cause of a multitude of problems, even when most things are working as they are supposed to. I’ve been running it locally for over a year, first Notes 6, and recently Notes 8, and I am never going back to running it from a network share.

A user came by me last week, complaining that his install was unstable. Once I’d installed it to his local drive, all of his stability problems were null and void. Fun stuff, I can tell you!

Note: Said user came by me today to tell me that this had actually cleared up all of the problems he’d been having. It is good to be right!

Lotus Notes: Resolving "File Already Exists" issues

razumny — Fri, 16 May 2008 05:56:00 +0000

Working in a Lotus Notes environment, I have seen quite a few of the issues concerned with Lotus Notes. Running Lotus Notes with the data-folder located on a network share, combined with sync of Offline folders has a nasty tendency of creating corrupt files.

A typical error is “File Already Exists”. Experience has pretty reliably show this to be a problem related to the bookmark.nsf-file.

The Solution
Lotus Notes has *.nsf files, database files, and *.ntf files, database template files. Knowing this, the solution to this problem is as follows:

Find the Lotus Notes data folder (Typically located at C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\Data)
Locate the bookmark.nsf file
Rename the file to bookmarks.nsf_old or something like that
Restart Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes will then recreate the bookmarks.nsf file using bookmarks.ntf